Posts Tagged ‘rugged mobile computers’

Can a strong enterprise mobility strategy help you beat your competition? Can it help you get a jump on your biggest competitor by allowing you to react faster to essential customer information? In order to answer these questions, think of what happens when your salespeople visit customers. Think about the information they gain from those visits and how important it is that you get that information as soon as possible. Imagine the impact when you, and everyone at the head office, get all the vital information needed to win the business. Now imagine the difference between getting that information instantaneously, and having to wait until the next morning when you finally receive your salesperson’s trip report. Do those 12 to 24 hours really make a difference? Absolutely! Can you better use that time to get a jump on your competition? Yes, you can.

The “Great Recession,” as it’s now called, has certainly hit every company pretty hard. Demand is down, fuel costs are up and uncertainty abounds. Supply chain professionals understand that today’s fuel surcharges are just part of the day-to-day hassles of managing incoming shipments. Higher freight impacts gross profit margins, and companies are often forced to absorb the losses. However, procurement professionals aren’t just burdened by higher freight; inventory financing is also steadily increasing, this despite today’s historically low interest rates. Unfortunately, if customers take too long to pay their invoices, then a company’s financing costs will increase, no matter how low interest rates are. So, with freight on the rise, and financing steadily increasing, what must your company do to reduce its inventory and supply chain costs?

Can enterprise SMB mobility hardware help to distinguish the product and service offering of a company? Granted, this may seem like an odd question. However, there are reasons to believe that a company with solid, up-to-date mobile business applications give it the upper hand versus competitors who rely upon manual processes. Think of how mobile devices can help a company provide more accurate information to customers. Think of how easily that information flows from the sales force, and customer service departments, all the way to the end-user customer base. Finally, think of how customers feel when they are serviced by a supplier that is always ready to serve. Companies distinguish themselves by their ability to provide timely information. More importantly, they distinguish their value propositions by their ability to immediately deliver on what they promise. Mobile business applications do exactly that because they are predicated on providing consistent, accurate and timely data to customers. This, more than anything else, helps a company to distinguish its value proposition, and it is this value proposition that speaks to the strength of the product and service offering for a company.

Does your enterprise currently rely upon vendor managed inventory? Do you view your vendor relationships, and agreements, as pivotal to your supply chain and the long-term success of your enterprise? More importantly, have you come to rely upon vendor managed inventory agreements in order to reduce monthly carrying charges for your company? If you have answered yes to each of these aforementioned questions, then you understand full well how important it is to have access to immediate information about raw material, part and finished good availability. It is this access to vendor data that is of vital importance to ensuring that your agreements are properly managed. Upgrading to enterprise mobility hardware will make managing these agreements a much easier process. In essence, it will simplify how vendor data is transferred to your company and allow your procurement department to make better, more informed decisions.

What role can enterprise mobility play in project management? In order to answer this question, think of how project managers define success. Some state that success is contingent upon their ability to complete a given project on time. Others focus on maintaining the overall budget of a project, while others concentrate on exceeding the expectations of each customer. Still, others might state that success is defined by how well the project is managed. Manage it properly, and the rest should follow. So, if success is defined by all these criteria, can project managers better manage their projects when they have the right enterprise mobility solutions? They most certainly can! However, it is not merely about having a software platform that can track the progress of a project in real-time, but ultimately about ensuring that all team members are mobile or have access to rugged mobile devices. This allows them to reduce on-site costs through a myriad of improvements. Interested in knowing what these improvements are?

Can upgrading your enterprise mobility solutions help improve company sales performance? Can your sales team close more orders when they have access to rugged handheld computers? Are your customers more likely to make purchase decisions when your sales team is able to give them everything they need? When answering these questions, think of how salespeople sell. Salespeople are most effective when they have all the information they need to close orders. They need information on material and part availability. They need information on credit terms, freight costs, scheduling and most importantly, pricing. This vital information is intrinsically linked. Part availability often has an impact on pricing, and it definitely has an impact on freight. Some customers may need those parts next day, while others can afford to wait. What customers can not afford is to not have this information. So, if having this information is so important to closing sales, then can having mobile computers help your sales team close more orders? It most certainly can! What are some of the scenarios where customers are more likely to place orders when salespeople can provide instant updates via mobile devices? Consider the following example.

How could anyone try to link enterprise mobility solutions with how a company manages customer expectations? What does one have to do with the other? After all, what possible role could your enterprise mobility hardware play in better managing customer expectations? When looking to answer these aforementioned questions, think of how important it is to provide your customers with timely answers. Think of how much better your company can serve its customer base when your salespeople, field service technicians and project managers all have access to rugged mobile computers, computers that can provide your customers with instant updates on order fulfillment. Think of how these mobile computers will distinguish your product and service offering within your market and amongst your customer base. Now think of how your competitors likely don not have this ability. Not only will it help better manage customer expectations, but it will position your enterprise as a market leader.

What are some of the recent advancements in inventory management? What are some of the more important movements within the mobile device market that help make these advancements possible? More to the point, what software and hardware advances have changed how companies manage inventory? When looking to answer these aforementioned questions, one only needs to look at the advancements made by Psion with its Omnii line of mobile devices or with Honeywell and their IntelaTrack PKS devices. So, what is special about these mobile product lines?

Why have stalwarts like Honeywell, Datalogic and Intermec focused so heavily on advancing enterprise mobility solutions for corporations? Why is it that some estimates put the ratio at 1 in 5 employees as being “mobile”, or connected? More importantly, why have so many companies decided to upgrade their supply chain practices with handheld, rugged mobile computers, barcode scanners and multiple mobile devices? In order to answer these questions, think of the speed at which business transactions happen today. Think of the importance of being able to keep pace with how quickly business landscapes change. Think of how your customers need suppliers who are able to react and ones that are not inhibited by manual processes that waste valuable time. Ultimately, think of why these aforementioned companies have invested so heavily in this market and then ask yourself, if the large players in industry are investing in mobility, shouldn’t I?

As a small business owner, it is probably about time your enterprise update its approach to warehouse management, approaches that rely upon enterprise mobility solutions that not only increase your customer response times, but also help to lower the costs of data entry errors? One where manual inventory counting methods are done away with entirely, and ultimately one where reconciling monthly inventory costs, levels and stock counts aren not predicated on problematic excel spreadsheets and inaccurate graphs and tables? Most importantly, your customers certainly deserve a vendor who is on the ball, ready to provide the answers they so desperately need!